It was only a “tussle,” a “skirmish.” And at some point, he just “lost it.”

“You know, I just saw this blood, so much at the time,” Lower East Side girlfriend-butcher Raul Barrera says in a chillingly minimizing and self-serving confession played publicly for the first time today, at a pre-sentencing hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court.

“I don’t know — I lost it,” Barrera mumbled to a cop and a prosecutor in the half-hour taped confession, taken five hours after he admittedly stabbed beautiful Lacoste sales manager Sarah Coit, 23, to death in her Clinton Street apartment last year.

He admitted callously dragging the dying woman from her living room into her bedroom and flinging his coat over her.

Then he called his parents, sister, and son, to “apologize,” changed out of his splattered pants and white shoes, and left to hail a cab out of the neighborhood, he told officials — all while Coit lay bleeding to death from 30 stab wounds.

“Okay, at any point did you call 911?” prosecutor William Beesch asks Barrera on the tape. “No,” the monster mumbles in response.

Not once in the interview did Barrera ask whether Coit is alive or dead, though he admits at one point that he thought her condition was “really bad” when he left the apartment.

“I was just afraid, panicked, scared,” he explained of not calling an ambulance. “I just, I didn’t know what to expect.”

The judge has set October 29 for sentencing, when he’ll announce how much time Barrera will spend in prison — anywhere from 15 years to life, the mandatory minimum, to the maximum allowed by law, 25 years to life. Barrera is hoping his guilty plea and his mental health issues will win him a sentencing break.